Post Finals
I ‘finished’ my last final, in complex analysis, about an hour ago. I’m not very pleased with my answers, but apparently everyone that took the class is in the same boat. The overwhelming majority of the students in the course are Aero students (interesting bit of trivia: the ACM department actually evolved out of the Aero department, as evidenced by the residual dominance of PDEs in our research, and the fact that Aero students tend to take a lot of the 100 level ACM courses). This morning an Aero student who’s not taking it said that the 1st years expect the results will make them look bad compared to the (3) applied math students in there, since we’re mathematicians. Amusing, because I always thought the Aero students would do better than us, since they should be accustomed to doing more hands-on mathematical manipulations of the sort that dominate the coursework. I have trouble figuring out simplifying changes of variables, because I haven’t used basic calculus in what seems like ages. I imagine they are much more in tune with that stuff than we are.
But apparently for both populations in the course, that was a killer final– just about everyone expects to get less than a 50. See for instance, problem 3. What the hell? I assume you solve that by Frobenius’ method, which gives you only one solution as a series with nontrivial coefficients, and then use reduction of order to get another independent solution. The calculations to get those coefficients was an exercise in algebra and series manipulation, and an object lesson in why CASes exist. Unfortunately, we couldn’t use any mechanical aid. Also interesting was problem 5, which I didn’t get, unless the BS I put down turns out to be magically true.
Of course, part of the problem, at least for me, is that the homework is optional…
Possibly relevant posts:
- Bombelli father of complex arithmetic? (5/26/2005)
- Notes from the underbelly (11/26/2007)
- Regular Series (7/20/2007)